Stanford Woods Environmental Forum featuring Marshall Burke

Marshall Burke Agricultural and Resource Economics University of California, Berkeley

Climate, Peace, and Economic Productivity

Evidence on how human society responds to changes in climate is a critical input into policy decisions about emissions mitigation. I describe a set of projects that study how a range of social and economic outcomes are shaped by changes in climate. I provide new empirical evidence that warmer temperatures make us both poorer and less peaceful, and provide evidence that recent human adaptation to warming temperatures has been minimal. I discuss what these results imply about the potential impacts of future climate change, and draw implications for what we might be willing to spend today to offset these impacts.